During a stopover en route to Zurich, Prof Declan Gilheany, associate professor of organic chemistry at UCD, and one of his PhD students Brian Kelly realised they were sitting on a new business approach to making catalysts - highly specific chemicals of use to the pharmaceutical industry.
"We had this moment of epiphany at Luton Airport," recalls Gilheany. They already knew that if they could get investors on board to fund robotic equipment, they could automate the process of looking at large numbers of chemical reactions and find commercially useful products. In a case of good timing, in Luton they realised that one of the projects in Gilheany's lab, headed up by another PhD student, Shane Robinson, had provided just the reaction on which to set up the business.
"We totted up the number of variants for that reaction and realised it would be a good fit for the robotic approach. That was the one to go for," says Gilheany.
Almost decade later, Celtic Catalysts is starting production of its first chemical for the market, based on the original reaction. The journey between idea and product has been long and sometimes challenging, says Gilheany, but the end result is gratifying.
Pictured above: Professor Declan Gilheany, Chief Scientific Officer and co-founder, Celtic Catalysts with Brian Elliott, Chairman and Dr Brian Kelly, co-founder and CEO
"There aren't that many chemists who can say the reaction they discovered or were part of has actually gone to production. So it's great."
So how did he get here? It started with a PhD at Queen's University Belfast and then research at NUI Maynooth before coming to UCD. And while his career has always been set in academia, his early work as a chemist gave him valuable exposure to industry.
A Fulbright scholarship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the late 1980s with pioneer Barry Sharpless gave him first-hand insight into moving lab chemistry into the real world: "I was exposed to the idea that you could do extremely challenging science work that would have almost immediate translation to the commercial sphere," says Gilheany, describing how Sharpless addressed the problem of making therapeutic drugs with the proper molecular orientation to work safely and effectively in the body.
This orientation of individual molecules, called "chirality", has long challenged the pharmaceutical industry. A sample of a chemical compound like a therapeutic drug can contain a mix of two mirrored molecular versions of itself, much like a right and left hand. “And each "hand", or chiral version of the drug, can have a different effect in the body,” explains Gilheany.
"If you don't do anything about it, you will have a 50/50 mix in the sample and the [target] receptor in the body is like a glove, so you need to provide the correct hand," he says.
Controlling the chirality of a drug can improve its efficiency and avoid undesirable side-effects, he notes, citing the case of an asthma drug where one "hand" blocked the airway-opening action of the other, meaning that administration to patients through inhalers had to be very carefully controlled.
From his own work, Gilheany saw that getting a tighter rein on handedness during chemical production offered commercial opportunity. But Celtic Catalysts came about only when co-founder Kelly suggested the business model and Robinson, who remains a shareholder in the company, had discovered the suitable reaction.
What followed was a lot of hard work, according to Gilheany. But the innovation and graft behind the company has earned widespread recognition, with Celtic Catalysts winning the international "Rising Star Award" at the BioIndustry Association (Scotland) Thistle Bioscience Forum in 2008, and later that year becoming the first spin-out company to receive the NovaUCD Innovation Award.
Gilheany now offers advice to upcoming innovators through agencies like Enterprise Ireland. And for companies looking to commercialise, he notes that funding mechanisms in Ireland have become smoother, but there remains a lack of wet-lab space for companies to extend outside the academic setting. Celtic Catalysts, which now employs 17 people, is headquartered at NovaUCD and has rented a production site in the North East of England.
But with the first batch of product on order to a worldwide supplier, the team now finds themselves poised in an enviable position – they are making chemical products suited to the new generation of complex, protein-based molecules being developed by the pharmaceutical industry.
"Many drugs are peptides but they tend to be strings of specialised amino acids. [Our product] is good for creating catalysts that enable that process," explains Gilheany.
On a personal level, he hopes the company's success will allow him to keep his academic work going after he officially retires. Another driver is that, ten years ago, he was involved with the so-called Foresight Exercise run by Forfás, which tried to predict what Ireland would be like in 2016 and suggest ways to prepare for it.
One of the outcomes of the exercise was Science Foundation Ireland, which is predicated on the returns for the Irish economy that will accrue from the performance of high quality research. "I felt I had (literally) to put my money where my mouth was when we discovered a powerful new reaction."
And to Irish innovators thinking about commercialisation Gilheany offers some hard-earned wisdom: get as much advice as you can, get to know the market and diversify so you don't rely on just one technology. "I'd say now is the time to do it," he says.